The Great Believers, Rebecca Makkai, author; Michael Crouch, narrator This novel alternates between the past in the 1980’s and pretty much the present, in 2015. In the traumatic early 80’s, there was a large scale outbreak of AIDS in the gay community. AIDS was already surging in Africa. Now it was ...
THE HUNDRED YEAR HOUSE by Rebecca Makkai I made it through 150 pages before deciding I didn’t really care about these people and their foibles and meandering progress through what passed for life. A failed writer, a failed artist, a failed mother, a failed son – who cares. The writing is lovely, the...
Though Theodor Adorno once wrote, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” art is one of the few ways to express the inexpressible. In Makkai’s collection, Music for Wartime, characters deal with their collections to the Iron Guard and the Arrow Cross and the Holocaust, betrayal, through music...
It's not everyday you run across a main character in a book that is a child librarian, which this book had. Unfortunately, Lucy, annoyed the heck out of me. I can't really put my finger on what exactly it was that annoyed me the most about her, but I really liked Ian, the other character. I also l...
When I was young and had just gotten in trouble for punching my brother or something because he'd done something to annoy me, my mother used to tell me, "Two wrongs don't make a right." This little piece of aphoristic wisdom was constantly in my mind as I read Rebecca Makkai's The Borrower. In Makka...
My dearest Laurelfield,Your tale started out as a short story about male anorexia. The author have no idea what the hell happened next, and neither do I, sorry to say !The first woman, Violet Saville Devohr, to step over your threshold, understood the meaning of doors when she said to her husband: “...
3 1/2 I received a promotional copy through the First Reads program.The copy I received is a paperback / uncorrected proofs. It starts on page 3 and ends on page 335. The formatting is a bit unusual, with numbered chapters in the first part, followed by no chapter divisions in the second part, and ...
**Thank you Penguin/Viking and Netgalley for providing this in exchange for an honest review** The Hundred-Year House takes place during four different times periods. We start out in 1999 and work our way backwards to 1900. Even though each time period has its own group of characters, all their st...
Lucy Hull is twenty-six and unmarried, a children's librarian in a fictional Hannibal, Missouri. The only child of a Russian immigrant father and a Jewish American mother, Lucy grew up in Chicago, bookish, very slightly rebellious, the inheritor of genetic guilt on both sides of the family. Always a...
So I have conflicting feelings about this book. I really liked its politics and I enjoyed the cute-sy imitations of children's books throughout. I liked the idea of the main character (a 26 year old English major from college who works at a small town library because she doesn't know what else to ...
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